Pinging Blogs after Updates

Way back in the olden days of computer networking (like 5 years ago?), a ping was a signal sent from one computer to another to test the connection and see if the computer on the other end was alive.

Not very many years later, a “ping” in internet marketing terminology is a message sent to websites that informs those sites an update has been made on your blog. Rather than waiting for search engines to visit and notice new info added to your blog, the ping announces “hey, look, new stuff”.

The procedure of pinging blogs after updates utilizes “ping sites” with appropriate names such as pingler, pingomatic and pingoat. Is it just me or are internet names getting sillier these days?

You can still use pinging to test a computer connection. A ping is nothing more than a pack of test data with a response that can be timed. The term “ping” originated from sonar used by submarines. Sonar sends out a pulse of sound and if there is a nearby ship or the sub is close to the floor of the ocean, the sound echoes back with a “ping”. A video screen displays the direction and the distance of the object that pinged the signal.

For blogs, pinging a new entry is often automatic and it’s a message to blog directories of new content added to your blog. It’s an invitation to their spiders to come and visit and update their information about your blog. With a new blog it’s wise to post frequently and regularly for the first few weeks as the pings indicate an active blog and blog directories and search engines are alerted to send spiders to visit often to find new content.

Until recently, each time you added a significant update you would go to pingoat or pingomatic, enter the url of your blog and instruct it to ping. For Wordpress there are plugins such as MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer that will ping your updates automatically and ignore edits. It takes over the chore of pinging and is a useful addition to WP blogs. Even better, in Wordpress releases of 2.7 and above all you must do is add a list of ping sites in your Wordpress control panel and WP will automatically ping those sites when you add a new blog entry. How easy is that?

For a time it was recommend that blog owners add multiple ping sites to the WP panel but that strategy resulted in some sites being alerted more than once when an update was made. This was frowned upon by the sites and the latest recommendations are to use only one or two ping services for your blog. That sends out notice of your updates to pingomatic (most often recommended) or pingoat and is broadcast from there – but avoids being viewed as a site that is too pushy about its updates.

Learning online marketing with you,

~ Julie